Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  At Smithfield, now London’s meat market, Wallace was subject to the same horrific form of execution as the Welsh rebel Daffydd: he too was hanged, disembowelled, beheaded and quartered.

  It was a graphic message of what happened to those who crossed the king. But it also made Wallace a martyr. No sooner had Edward dealt with Wallace than a dangerous new enemy took his place: Robert the Bruce. Despite the absence of the Scottish crown and the Stone of Destiny, Bruce had himself crowned king of Scots in 1306. He continued to harry the English; Edward retaliated with punitive campaigns and brutal reprisals. For, as with Wales earlier, he saw Scottish resistance not as war but as rebellion against his legitimate rule.

  It was on his way north in 1307 to wage yet another war against Bruce that Edward died at the age of sixty-eight. There is a story that his last wish was that his body should be boiled until the bones were clean of flesh and his skeleton be carried at the head of every English army until the Scots were finally crushed. It didn’t quite work out like that. Instead, his body was buried in his father’s great church, Westminster Abbey. Inscribed on his tomb were the words ‘Malleus Scoturum’, ‘Hammer of the Scots’. What Edward had done was right and just by his standards. But he had the weakness of his strength. If he had been less rigid and less hammer-like the union of England and Scotland, so close in 1291, might have come about smoothly and naturally. And both countries would have been spared centuries of war, bloodshed and devastation.

  But that is asking Edward to be other than he was. He was a supremely self-confident king, with a clear sense of the power and rights of the crown. He may be remembered for his wars but his legacy was much greater. At home, Edward reaffirmed, sometimes in spite of himself, the direct bonds between the crown and people. Abroad, his victories began to foster a sense of national pride.

  But how would England cope with his successor, a man ruled by private obsessions rather than royal ambition?

  III

  Edward I would have been a difficult act to follow for any son. But Edward II was particularly ill equipped to step into his father’s shoes. He may have looked like his father – tall, handsome and strong – but they had little else in common. Even his recreations were odd. He shunned the traditional pastimes of princes, preferring ‘common pursuits’ like rowing, swimming and boatbuilding.

  At the beginning of Edward’s reign the contrast of character with his father was not necessarily seen as a bad thing. Edward I had undoubtedly been a great king. But, especially in his later years, England had paid a terrible price for his driving ambition and men were looking forward to a quieter life under his apparently more accommodating son.

  The symbol of the change was the new oath which Edward swore at his coronation. Out went Edward I’s ringing promise to defend the rights of the crown; in came a new oath that the king would uphold and defend ‘the laws and rightful customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen’. ‘I so agree and promise,’ Edward swore. In those few words he had abandoned any claim to absolute royal power and he undertook instead to rule by consent and in cooperation with the nobles. A brave new world, it seemed, had dawned.

  But Edward lacked – for good and ill – not only his father’s strength of will; he also had a worrying personality flaw. This was evident even at his coronation. He was crowned with his wife Isabella by his side. But it was his childhood friend, Piers Gaveston, who stole the show. Edward had eyes and ears only for Piers, and Piers in turn gave himself the airs and graces of a royal favourite. He even wore purple robes at the coronation rather than the traditional gold. To add injury to insult Edward then presented Piers with the best of his new wife’s jewels and wedding presents.

  Whether or not the relationship between Piers and Edward was homosexual in our sense of the word is unclear. No contemporary explicitly says that it was. But they probably came as near as they could. One describes Edward’s feelings for his favourite as like ‘the love, that surpasses the love of a woman’. Another wrote: ‘I do not remember to have heard that one man so loved another. Jonathan cherished David. But we do not read that they were immoderate. Our king, however, was incapable of moderate favour and on account of Piers was said to forget himself …’

  In short, Edward and Piers were breaking the rules and they were offending those who saw themselves as the guardians of the rules: the English nobility. The nobility wanted reform, and their grievances focused on Piers. They also saw it as an opportunity to exert power over the new monarch. Only two months after the celebrations of the coronation, the nobility delivered an ultimatum to their new king: either exile Piers or face civil war. Their loyalty, they said, was to the monarchy, not to the king.

  Not exactly in the spirit of the demands, Gaveston was sent to Ireland to rule it on behalf of the king. But Edward was not to be browbeaten. He had, it turned out after all, inherited his father’s determination as well as his looks. But only in small things: Edward I had aimed to conquer Wales and Scotland; the summit of Edward II’s ambition was to keep his adored Piers by his side. For this there were no depths to which he would not sink. He cajoled, bribed and threatened his nobles. He conceded further measures of reform. Finally, they relented and allowed Piers to return.

  Overjoyed, the king rode to Chester to be reunited with his friend. But Piers and Edward had learned nothing. Together they resumed war against the Scots, thereby placing strain on the tax system and reviving the opposition which had faced Edward I. Edward also ignored his vague promises of reform, while Gaveston refused to conciliate the nobility. Instead he continued to treat the leading magnates of the country with contempt. He gave them nicknames: Burst Belly, Joseph the Jew, the Cuckold’s Bird and the Black Dog of Arden. This amused Edward. But it made deadly enemies of his targets.

  Piers’s mockery of the nobility was the classic response of the outsider confronted by a clique of crusty old insiders. The English nobility saw government as being rather like a club. Membership, they felt, should be limited to people of the ‘right’ background: in other words to nobles like themselves. And everyone should obey the rules, including the king himself. And the first and most important rule was to respect the rights and privileges, together with the sensitivities and values, of the nobility themselves. This attitude was of course selfish and class-ridden. But it was the only way that the idea of royal government as responsible government could be given real meaning. Only the nobility were strong enough to hold the king to account, and in the circumstances of 1310 this meant forcing him, by violence if necessary, to get rid of Piers Gaveston.

  In March Edward was forced to send Piers away as the nobility strengthened their forces. Edward remained and agreed to surrender. Twenty-one Lords Ordainer worked out a document containing forty-one clauses. It was almost a rerun of 1258 when Henry III’s personal rule was picked apart. The king was not allowed to make any gifts without the approval of Parliament; the revenue was taken out of the king’s hands; and he was not allowed to make war or even leave the kingdom without permission. This was a savage limitation of Edward’s sovereignty. But even worse was the Ordainers’ all-out attack on ‘evil counsellors’, who, they said, had set the kingdom on the course to ruin. Gaveston was named. He was the ‘evident enemy’ of the monarchy and the people. And he was to be exiled, not just from England but all Edward’s domains.

  Edward had to accept the Ordinances. But he could not give Piers up to the noble mob. He played for time. But the storm was gathering. The nobles and bishops met at St Paul’s Cathedral in March 1313 and ordered the arrest of Piers.

  Edward and Piers fled north, Edward abandoning his pregnant wife, Isabella, to his enemies. She would not forget the insult. But it was all for nothing. Piers was caught and taken prisoner by the earl of Warwick – the man whom he had mocked as ‘the Black Dog’. There was no formal trial. Instead Warwick and four nobles decided his fate. The verdict was death and he was beheaded at Blacklow Hill near Warwick.

  Edward was grief-stricken at Gaveston
’s murder. But it was more than a personal loss. He had also lost face as king. Gaveston was the thing in the world that had mattered most to him. But he had not been powerful enough, or feared enough, to protect his life or to avenge his death. What was the authority of such a king worth?

  Edward, under attack at home, decided to try to recover his position abroad. Bruce’s long guerrilla campaign in Scotland was at last bearing fruit: he drove the English from key castles; he even dared strike across the border with devastating raids.

  Edward and his nobles sank their differences sufficiently to mount a vast punitive expedition against Scotland. Here in the field of battle, Edward might yet redeem himself. The English and Scottish armies met on 23 June 1314 just outside Stirling. Much to the English surprise, the Scots took the initiative. At daybreak it was they who advanced. But then Edward’s surprise turned to amazement. Edward was reported as saying ‘they kneel and ask for mercy’. One of his Scottish officials knew his countrymen better and replied: ‘they ask for mercy but not from you. To God they pray, for them it’s death or victory.’

  The battle began and the English knights charged the Scots’ front line. But the Scots held firm. Unable to break the front rank, the English withdrew. But their retreat turned into a rout. Encumbered by heavy armour, many men drowned in the boggy ground. The losses were huge and Bannockburn became infamous as England’s most shameful defeat by the Scots.

  Leaving his troops to be massacred, Edward fled from the field of battle and, with only a handful of followers, rode desperately for Dunbar. He took refuge overnight in the castle, which was in friendly hands. The following morning he set sail for England.

  The war with Scotland had given Edward the opportunity to redeem his reputation. Instead the shattering defeat of Bannockburn sent it to new depths. He proved to be as bad a general as he was a politician and his flight made him seem like a coward as well. He now appeared unmanly as well as unkingly. The political consequences were inescapable. Immediately after Bannockburn Edward was forced to swallow the Ordinances and accept that he had sacrificed his sovereignty. There were also other, more insidious, developments. How, people began to ask, could such a creature as this be the son of the great Edward? And they answered their own question by saying that he wasn’t, that he was a changeling and not royal at all. And thus began the rumours about the king’s birth which his own fondness for such peasant activities as rowing, thatching, fishing and boatbuilding seemed only to confirm.

  Nor was Edward any more successful as a husband. As a young bride Isabella had had to accept her husband’s devotion to Piers. But by the 1320s she was older, wiser and, crucially, the mother of the heir to the throne. Edward had also acquired a new favourite, Hugh Despenser. Like Piers, Despenser was given gifts and power. And once again the nobility sensed danger. It led to civil war, from which Edward managed to emerge victorious. He slipped free of the restraints imposed by the Ordinances. The result was autocratic royal government, another pointless campaign against Scotland and more power for the favoured Despenser.

  The young Hugh Despenser achieved extraordinary influence over Edward. Enraged by this renewed humiliation, Isabella had taken a lover, Roger Mortimer, earl of March. She said that the ‘bond’ of holy matrimony had been broken by an ‘intruder’. She vowed to be avenged and fled to France with Mortimer. And there they planned their invasion of England. In September 1326 Isabella landed in England and met with little resistance. Marching through a tired and war-weary country, she seized the crown in the name of her and Edward’s eldest son, a third Edward.

  Isabella and Mortimer had no difficulty in seizing the throne. But it proved less easy to justify their actions as there was no constitutional machinery to depose a crowned and anointed king. This meant they had to resort to the astonishing legal innovation of the Articles of Accusation. The articles accused the king, the fount of justice, of a series of high crimes against his country. Instead of good government by good laws he had ruled by evil counsel. Instead of justice he had sent noblemen to shameful and illegal deaths. He had lost Scotland and Gascony and he had oppressed and impoverished England. In short, he had broken his coronation oath – here treated as a solemn contract with his people and his country – and he must pay the price. For the first time in English history a reigning monarch was formally deposed from the throne.

  Edward’s miserable state was described in a poem which he may have written himself.

  In winter woe befell me

  By cruel fortune threatened

  My life now lies a ruin.

  Once I was feared and dreaded

  But now all men despise me

  And call me a crownless king

  A laughing stock to all.

  Edward was imprisoned in the Guard Room in the keep of Berkeley Castle. He soon escaped but was recaptured. Thereafter his imprisonment became stricter and heavy locks and bolts were bought for the doors. Finally he was murdered. It could not, of course, be seen as murder and pains were taken to leave as few marks as possible on the body. According to most contemporary accounts he was pressed down with a table with heavy weights and suffocated. But another account, written only thirty years after his death, suggests a more horrible end. The king was held head down; a hollow instrument, like the end of a trumpet, was forced into his fundament and a red-hot poker thrust up it into his bowels. The Articles of Accusation had been a kind of inversion of Edward’s coronation oath: if this story is true then his death was a vile parody of the pleasures he was supposed to have enjoyed with Piers Gaveston.

  IV

  In April 1331, a three-day tournament was proclaimed in the name of the new king, Edward III. His father, Edward II, had banned the tournament, preferring more rustic pastimes. But Edward III excelled at the joust. Indeed, while Edward II had disappointed the traditional expectations of what a king should be, Edward III embodied the perfect contemporary image of kingship. Like Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria after him, Edward personified the values of his age. Edwardian England was an age of knights and fantasy castles, of honours and arms, of pageantry and jousts. It was a culture and a country rooted in war. And leading the country into battle was a hero king, Edward III.

  Despite the revolution that placed him on the throne, Edward had to fight to rule as well as reign. His mother’s lover Mortimer had taken effective control of the kingdom in 1327. Edward was then only fourteen. Nevertheless, Mortimer saw the boy king as a threat. Edward was kept under the strictest control, watched and followed. Mortimer hoarded power and land for himself, lording over king and nobility alike. It was a new tyranny for England. And Edward had to use guile and subterfuge to break these bonds. He reached out to the nobility, building up support. In 1330, Mortimer got wind of the conspiracy against him. He summoned the king to Nottingham to interrogate the young man before a great council – that is, a parliament without the representatives of the commons. Overnight, however, Edward and his band got into Nottingham Castle through an underground tunnel. They surprised Mortimer the dictator, overpowered him, and had him arrested. He was condemned and executed as a common criminal at Tyburn.

  Edward had won control by shrewdness and personal bravery. It was a fine start to his personal rule.

  After the disasters of his father’s reign it was natural that Edward would model himself on his grandfather, the heroic warrior king Edward I. But it was a return with a difference. Edward had none of his grandfather’s ruthless driving energy or his stiff-backed authoritarianism either. Instead he cultivated an easy, winning charm. He was a good family man with a pretty wife and a rapidly growing brood of fine sons. He was capable of striking populist gestures, such as when he entered a town in triumph, not on horseback, but on foot and leading his wife and eldest son by the hand. And he would meet the humblest knight in the tournament, man to man, and win. In short, Edward was the perfect gentleman, affable, sporting and brave, who would rule England as the first among equals of his nobility.

  This was a quiet revo
lution. For Edward, there would be no divisive, upstart favourite like Piers Gaveston. Instead Edward, unlike Mortimer, unlike his father or even his grandfather, truly accepted that he had to work in harmony with the nobility. Indeed, to do so was a pleasure as well as a duty.

  The result was that Edward encouraged an aristocratic culture, which bound the king and nobles together. Its most vivid expression was in heraldry and coats of arms.

  Originally a man’s coat of arms had the purely practical function of identifying him on the battlefield when he was encased in a suit of armour. But soon a whole world of meaning was added. A man’s coat of arms showed who his ancestors were; whom he had married; whether he was an elder or younger son and what honours he had won. Edward III was an aficionado of all this and he established a new order of chivalry based on the legend, then of course believed to be true, of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was called the Order of the Garter.

  The story goes that at a court ball a lady let slip her garter, which fell to the floor. Amidst the laughter, the king himself bent down, retrieved it and silenced the titters by saying Honi soi qui mal y pense: ‘shame be to him who thinks evil of it’. Be that as it may, the Garter with its blue-and-gold ribbon encircling a man’s coat of arms became the supreme mark of noble honour. And St George, the saint of soldiers and nobles, to whom the Order of the Garter was dedicated, became the patron saint of England.

  But all this glamour and glitz masked a darker, deadlier imperative. Edward and his nobles belonged to a killing culture in which a man gained honour and respect by slaughter. Sport, in particular, was all about the kill. A man killed animals in the hunt and came near to killing human beings in the joust and the tournament. And war, where a man killed for real, was the noblest sport of them all.